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Linux Turns 10
An AC sent in: "The IBM PC may be 20 years old, but they're not the only ones with a birthday coming up. Check out www.linux10.org for an invitation to a birthday party on August 25 for the Linux kernel. The big bash is in Sunnyvale, just down the peninsula from the San Francisco LinuxWorld Expo, but there are also links to local parties around the globe (or if there are none near you, plan your own and add it to the list)."
Wow. Somewhat of an interesting story for me. I just got through with a long car trip with the audio book of Linus' "Just For the Fun of It" to keep my brain occupied during the mind-numbing journey.
It talked a lot about Linus himself, how Linux started, his views on Open Source, politics and the meaning of life. (His take on the meaning of life was not insightful, but at least interesting.)
Did you know that Linux started out as an overgrown terminal emulation program to read USENET newsgroups from the University's computer, and ran under Minix?
Neat stuff. Linus was taken completely by surprise that Linux has gotten to where it is today. On one hand, had he known of all the work that was ahead of him, and that he'd be spending ten years of his life on it, he would have given up. But on the other hand, seeing all that it has done and the benefits that it has brought, he said he probably would have went forward with it.
If this sounds schizophrenic, at least according to the book, that partially describes a number of Linus' views. Like on intellectual property.
Anyhow, glad to read there will be a Linux anniversary celebration, and for an intersting commute, pick up the audio book. Five CD's full.
www.linu x10 .org
I know I almost did. Those damn cameras are going to ruin this world...
Regards,
KGraci
If ever having left someone's prescence, you feel as if you lost a quart of plasma, AVOID that prescence -W.H.Burroughs
...also related to infrastructure, can be found here. It's so interesting to compare what both have done to the internet. ;)
A usable interface? :)
Is it really worth celebrating that two things that were originally intended as quick backwards compatibility HACKS has stayed around this long, spending huge amounts of energy on maintaining backwards compatibility?
The IBM PC never was very well designed to begin with, and neither was UN*X. Still, both technologies keep their life force because they've already become standards.
The IBM PC was designed to make porting easy for already existing x86 CP/M software. Check the documented CP/M backwards compatibility interrupts if you don't believe me. It used commodity parts because time-to-market was the most important issue. CP/M itself wasn't used because of a legal fight between IBM and Digital. (I believe this was mentioned in a documentary film labeled "Triumph of the Nerds".)
The reason that Linus got so much help with creating Linux, was because they wanted it to run already existing UN*X software, quickly.
As any low level coder can attest, the IBM PC as it is today is a kluge on a kludge on a hack. Just the process of making it boot is a tedious job with pitfalls around every corner. It's got an entire 16-bit computer inside that's only used during the first couple of seconds after you turn it on. The CPU is full of instructions that are never ever used by the programs that 99.9% of PC users use.
I'm almost amazed it still works.
Linux on the other hand has been totally redesigned since its hack days. There are still a major limitations with the way it's designed, though. It's a monolithic kernel, an ancient design principle, where everything is running in the same place, intermixed like crazy. The increased modularity of the recent kernels help with some things, letting you add drivers during runtime, but doesn't help much with larger upgrades, or making it easy to develop for. A more modern kernel design such as the Hurd can let a regular user develop and try out larger kernel parts during runtime, whereas with linux a reboot is still required for upgrading most nonessential parts of the kernel. And since it's just one big heap of code, a mistake in one place can make the whole thing crap out. It's a stroke of fortune that Linus has the inhuman ability to maintain such a beast.
And that's just Linux. For UNIX, the main word is Inconsistency. The inconsistencies of the API are quite hair raising, and many of the calls are practically hacks that remained, and never got implemented proper. The security model is laughable, a philosophy that you either are God (root), or you are not. The commandset is just as intuitive as you'd expect, where practically every program has a different way of recieving command line arguments. The X Window System is an add on that is also full of kludges. It eats more and more memory and can never release it. It is optimized for a situation that is hardly ever the case, namely that the applications are running on a remote computer, making every tiny little bit that's going to appear on your screen pass through a bunch of network abstraction layers. That's one of the reasons X on a monster workstation often feels slower than the actually hundreds of times slower machines we were using in the 80's...
Excuse me for hardly even touching the surface on that one, but I started feeling nauseous.
All the while we were focusing our efforts on what was already there, smart new designs came and went, because they weren't backwards compatible.
Great new designs have been researched, which would help the totally different demands of computing today. But still people cling to what they know, and prefer to hang on to what they have no matter how much extra work it'll take in the long run.
Why is this? So we can run software from the 80's? Modern versions of Windows won't. Linux will, but what is the use, seeing that practically everything has been rewritten since anyhow?
The reason not for switching to something new is not to rewrite the software, but that's happening continuously anyhow, so why would that be a problem?
What's holding us back then? To put it in Slashdot terms I think it's FUD. Not the technique, but the feelings themself. Human nature.
We pretty much like it better the older it gets, no matter how many wrinkles and scars it accumulates.
Happy Birthday, PC and Linux.
We love you more each year.
In Just for Fun Linus marks the first release date as September 17, 1991. The version was 0.01
Geeks go fucking crazy when surrounded by even a dozen people. How the hell do you think they'll react when surrounded by a DOZEN THOUSAND at a LINUX RAVE? Good god, at least let them hang out in the cool-down room. There aren't *too* many people in those.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
...and everyone that is a part of the open source community, including "mere" users. In ten years we have come further than any comparable OS in that same amount of time. Remember, this isn't ten years since Linux 1.0 - this is ten years since the project was announced _at all_.
What's most amazing is that we've done it all on our own sweat, blood and tears. We've created something for ourselves (and others) that is powerful, useful, and has shaped the world of technology (and thus the world in general) in many important ways. All of it was for just one goal: to create something cool.
Congratulations, everyone!
We're celebrating the anniversary of the announcement which got the community involved in Linux. The first beta testers and offers for help came in after this announcement. August 25, 1991 was when Linux changed from being just Linus' hobby to involving others. Yes, it does pre-date the first kernel posting by a few weeks.
You can choose different criteria and arrive at a different day. Linux10.org will respect your choice and still link to your local celebration's web site if you pick a different day based on Linux history. The first involvement of the community was what we thought made this date stand out among other candidates. But as a counterexample, SSLUG in Copenhagen chose Sept 17 based on the actual posting of Linux 0.01. As long as you have a reason grounded in Linux history, it's an equally good choice. (Though I think Aug 25 and Sept 17 are the only two you're going to find.)
For those who tried to argue one date over the other, don't bother. You will never settle it because there are different criteria by which these dates can be picked. However, I urge you to respect the choices of the volunteers who go to the time and effort to organize a Linux 10th anniversary event in your area.
(BTW, sorry that I didn't post this earlier. I was at the Moffett Air Show all day.)
Linux is just more proof shit does not sell.
Well, actually...
What do you get for the kernel that already has everything?
Lotsa birthdays coming up! Be sure you don't miss these high-tech celebrations:
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